Freedom under Paramountcy: Đa gi năng Traders as Active Moral Agents in Late-socialist Vietnam

Abstract

Building on fieldwork between 2012–2019 in a northern Vietnamese village, this article documents the striking ways villagers have dealt with an enduring concern of those who inhabit the complex moral world of post-/ late-socialism: how to handle choices that involve thinking and acting like neoliberal subjects. I focus on a relatively undocumented livelihood strategy villagers call đa gi năng, a term with striking moral connotations that means “keeping multiple livelihood strategies and never putting all eggs in one basket.” This strategy is inspired by a locally specific reference point: the well-being of the family, perceived in Xuan as both the achievement of substantial material improvements for the family and the protection of its hard-won security against unpredictable state policies. It is this reference point that grants villagers remarkable moral freedom, both to actively pursue substantial material comfort for the family by means of rational market calculations and independent decisions without being troubled by moral frameworks that treat neoliberalism as problematic, and to evade with explicit moral confidence the state’s push to fully embrace neoliberal spirits and commit everything to a single profitable yet risky enterprise. I argue that the well-being of the family is the paramount moral value in Xuan. While the existing scholarship has focused mostly on how paramount values facilitate cultural reproduction of a Durkheimian kind, this article shows that the family as the paramount value can grant freedom. Although subjects are confined within the moral domain the paramount value creates, it is within that confined space that they can find the freedom to choose the kind of self they wish to be.